Sermon Mark 4:26-34 14 June 2015 Proper 6, Year B

 God help me, I was going to preach something safe and comforting today. It’s my last Sunday with you after all. I could play it safe and say a lot of comforting things about how we just need to let God do what God does. All we have to do is plant the seeds. Or with the second parable, I could talk about how God takes a tiny mustard seed and makes a huge plant out of it. The Gospel stories for today can certainly be preached that way. We don’t even have to think of them as parables. We can make them safe by turning them into fables or allegories.

A fable about the mustard seed would interpret like this: Large things can grow from something very small indeed. An allegory would interpret the mustard seed like this: If your faith is small and you nurture it, it will do the same thing the mustard seed did. But parables, especially the parables Jesus tells, are neither safe nor easy. Parables are designed to have multiple interpretations, and multiple ways of twisting your brain around. Parables make you think, and oftener than not, disturb the status quo by making you think about things you’d rather not think about at all. Parables are intended to mess up our normal way of thinking, to be subversive in a variety of ways. And parables get inside our heads and cause us to think differently, to sometimes get us so frustrated we don’t know quite what to do about them. And if we’ll stay with them and keep thinking about them, parables can be life changing and we might be transformed before we know it. Maybe that’s just what Jesus had in mind. You think?

Now let me make it clear that there is nothing wrong with interpreting parables as allegories or fables. Interpreting them that way can say some really important things about what we believe about the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God may not be easy to spot. The kingdom of God may appear really tiny but end up being large in influence or size or scope when we least expect it. And yet, if we treat these parables like parables, we might begin to look at then differently and we may not always be safe.

Suppose we focus on what a very odd thing a mustard seed really is. Some varieties of mustard seeds are used as spices, some are used as medicine, and some are used as food. But in general, in a field or garden, in Jesus’ time, they were considered weeds, and noxious weeds at that. Dangerous weeds, uncontrollable weeds that can choke out other plants and take over an entire area. In Jesus’ time, mustard would hardly ever be in someone’s garden. Instead it would grow unchecked in a fallow field, or in an open uncultivated area.

         

If you’re a lawn guy or gal, or a gardener or a farmer, select your least favorite weed. How about a weed that has to be controlled by law? Something that appears on the Nebraska Noxious Weed List: Salt Cedar, Purple Loosestrife, Knapweed, one of several varieties of Thistle, or even Knotweed. If you like the garden-variety stuff, there’s our mowers’ favorite: dandelions, or various other things that seem to grow stronger every time you mow them down.

         

Interesting, because that’s what Jesus is doing here. He’s comparing the kingdom of God to a noxious weed that is difficult and almost impossible to control. Now do you think that’s a comforting image? And what about those birds that take shelter in the mustard plant? Maybe what Jesus is talking about is those undesirable birds that showed up in an earlier parable at the beginning of chapter 4 of Mark’s Gospel. Remember those birds? They were the ones that ate up the seed the farmer scattered on the path. Do you think that’s a comforting image? Maybe what Jesus means is when the kingdom of God grows unchecked and really takes root, undesirable birds or perhaps even undesirable people show up. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we find unchecked growth uncomfortable or even threatening. We can’t control it or shape it to our image of what “nice” church should look like, or sound like, or be like.

         

So maybe that’s a part of what Jesus is doing with that obnoxious and noxious mustard seed this morning. Maybe that’s part of what Jesus is saying about the mustard that won’t go away and keeps on growing unchecked. Maybe part of what Jesus is asking us to hear is that annoying and noisy mustard seed and those birds and people that can’t be controlled.

Maybe what Jesus has in mind this morning instead of a nice little parable for public consumption, is a subversive, dangerous and risky plot to transform us and change the world. Are you up for that? AMEN.

The Rev. Nicolette Papanek

 ©2015